21 comments:

very nice and concise interview, John. the Animation school courses you outlined make sense. i'm trying to teach myself flash and i see how it can make an artist potentially lazy with all the "tweening" and crap. i'm trying to take a more traditional path with it by drawing on paper and scanning into flash and working from there. good stuff, John.

I really hope your predictions on Web TV come true, but the trends right now seem to be swaying in the opposite direction.

I just downloaded Joost, a program that lets you watch TV shows and channels from your computer, not because I thought I would enjoy it, just to check it out. It's still being beta tested, so it doesn't really work well, but it will eventually. It's one of the many Web TV programs that's slated to come out this year, and I'm worried that one of them will become popular.

Of all your ideas for the future of cartoons (and television and film in general) direct sponsorship is by far the best one. It seems so obvious that it just pisses me off to see that almost everyone in the industry is against it. All the new forthcoming Web TV programs are being set up with a small amount of commercials between content. But we all know that once one program becomes popular, the commercials will become more frequent and more obnoxious, and Web TV will just become the way TV is today: shitty.

If any one of these new programs set things up the way you set up your flash shows, with direct sponsorship, maybe we could finally recapture some of the joy that TV had when it first started and not have to look at awful commercials made by agencies who don't know a damn thing about entertainment.

Also, Joost is being backed by Viacom, and I was surprised to find that Ren and Stimpy is actually on there. Did you know that?

Perfect timing on posting this interview John. Most importantly, for me, is the animation school course ideas. I just recently decided to go back and relearn animation from the ground up, doing it properly this time instead of the way that money pit called an Art Institute taught me. Do you think 25-30 hours/week of dedicated study will be enough? Right now I'm starting the Preston Blair exercises to improve my structural/construction drawing as well as doing the Shamus Culhane sketch exercises every morning to improve my creativity with poses.

What a great interview. Sign me up for that school! I hope TV doesn`t die, because you get better picture quality on TV than on the web. That`s why there should be more Direct-to-DVD.

>Have you ever seen "Cartoon Alley" on TCM? They play a bunch of classic cartoons- 3 per episode. The host of the show said a good quote on the last show:

I saw that! They showed three Lah Droopy Cinemascope cartoons! I almost crapped my pants, they`re the perfect marriage of 40s style and 50s stylized Benedict style! Ed did the layouts, Monte did the backgrounds!

That was a fun interview John. The net is the way to to watch cartoons, and it will change television. Also you were the first person to tell me about the Cintiq back at your house last year and I just picked one up and it's amazing. I got used to it after 30 minutes or so, but it is like drawing on paper. Its sure in hell better than trying to draw with a tablet on the desk. Maybe one of these days you can get your software made to suit your needs but Mirage is still the best that I have used in the industry (and the cheapest). Anyways good post..........

You'd be doing the whole world a favor by rejuvenating some cereal commercials. I just pointed out not too long ago on one of my own blogs about how cereal ads have been in hibernation for some time. (Does General Mills seriously think that stupid wolf is going to sell Cookie Crisp?)

There aren't too many sexy girls in animation for some unfortunate reason

I'm wholly prepared to prove you wrong on that account. ;)

Every couple weeks or so I tune in to the Fox sitcoms to see if I can find anything interesting. King Of The Hill has some funny stuff.

with open source programmers i meant programmers who work on free software and not for some company.

but i should have left that away. i just thought that you maybe could get some people who program interested through your blog and at least get a discussion started about your animation software ideas.